In physical and mental decline... Hemingway two years before his death. Photograph: John Bryson/Time Life Pictures/Getty

In looking at In Our Time and A Moveable Feast, we've mainly focused on Hemingway as a young man: fit, young and heading for the stratosphere. But as Mogger64 noted in his original nomination, it's significant that A Moveable Feast was "written at the end of his life". It isn't quite the work of an old man. Hemingway never made it that far. But it's pretty much the last word from someone on the way out. It speaks as loudly of Hemingway at the end of his career as it does of the beginning.

And that career was remarkable. He had done it all by 1956, when he was spurred into reminiscence following the rediscovery of some old Paris notebooks which had lain for many years in a trunk in the basement of the Ritz hotel. He'd won the Nobel prize. He'd won the Pulitzer prize. He'd sold hundreds of thousands of books. He'd inspired dozens of imitators. He'd become an adjective and a legend. His life outside writing was just as celebrated: the bull fight aficionado, the boxer, the big game hunter, the fisherman, the friend of Spanish Republicans, the man who liberated Paris. Papa: the tall, handsome, heavyweight alpha male.

But by 1956 all that was heading into memory, if it had ever really existed. Plenty of people said his writing had long since gone into decline, although that's a debate we could profitably have here. (Most writers would settle for a fallow period that included The Old Man And The Sea and A Moveable Feast.) Physically and mentally, however, there was no question that he was struggling. His once-powerful body, already softened by years of good living and hard drinking, took a pummelling in the years after the war. A car crash in 1945 smashed his knee. Two successive plane crashes in 1954 gave him severe concussion, a broken skull, cracked discs, burns, kidney and liver ruptures and a dislocated shoulder. Then he was caught in a bush fire for good measure. Add to that his wounds from the first world war, insomnia, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, and a dangerously increased alcohol intake to counter all the pain, and you have a sick man. Elsewhere, his literary friends (and enemies) were dropping like flies. He'd been through three divorces and his children – especially his youngest son, Gigi – were all troubled. He was becoming increasingly convinced (rightly as it turned out) that the FBI were trailing him. He also suffered – as did so many in his family – from depression.

He was, in short, a wreck as he struggled to complete his Paris sketches. A Moveable Feast should be seen as the product of a man in terminal decline as much as the triumphant recollection of one beginning to realise his true powers.

Except, it doesn't read like that. One of the most impressive things about A Moveable Feast is how sure and how hopeful it seems. How much fun it all is.

Although, of course, we shouldn't ignore the bitterness and unpleasantness. "The rich" who would do so much to sour Hemingway's life come in for some stick. So too does Pauline, his second wife, the woman who took him from the Hadley he speaks of so fondly in the book. And then there is the Ford Madox Ford business, labelled "excruciating" by Reading Group contributor OshiMichi. Here was a man who helped Hemingway a great deal. A writer who, for the Good Soldier alone, deserves the title "great". A man who, by all accounts, fought bravely in the first world war, and suffered dreadfully – he had poison gas to thank for heavy breathing Hemingway remarks upon. And yet Hemingway treats him with vicious contempt. Personally, I don't object to the story as much as OshiMichi. The business with the drink orders is amusing (rudeness to waiters is always a reliable shorthand for an ugly personality), and Aleister Crowley's cameo made me laugh, first time around. It's also probably true that Ford was unpleasant company. Plenty of others wrote similar things about the ugly, smelly, wheezy old walrus who, by the 1920s, seemed a relic from another age. I should also say that this chapter is based on those notes from the trunk. Perhaps we can forgive this as a product of the young generation doing as it should and sticking two fingers up to the one before. Or perhaps I should stop making excuses for Hemingway. After all, it's his faults as well as his astonishing talent that make him such a fascinating character. The ultimate truth is that the story leaves a bad taste. The young man left it out. (It was originally written for Fiesta.) The older man put it back in. (Even if we can never be certain that he would have kept it in the final version.)

The older man, however, could also write sentences like this:

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

And this:

"I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist."

And this:

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

He could craft moments like that are delightful, awful, joyful, and horrible by turn; writing that is eternal. Even at the end, Hemingway could still do it. Or, at least, he could until he was sent for electroshock therapy, which ruined his memory. In his introduction to the revised 2009 edition of A Moveable Feast, Patrick Hemingway includes his father's "last piece of professional writing", an attempted forward to the memoir:

"This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist."

Early in the morning of 2 July 1961, Ernest Hemingway pulled down a shotgun from the rack, loaded it, put the barrel in his mouth and splattered his brains over the vestibule of his house.

Every month, Sam Jordison will host an online reading group, featuring a book chosen by you. He will give you the background on the author and the world in which the book was written, ask experts in to tackle any points you raise, and invite the author on to the site for a for a live web chat - while you get on with the serious business of talking